Learning Boundaries: From Children and the Elderly to Humanity's Perception as a Whole

1. A Child's Boundaries: In the Moment of Crying, Who Is in Charge of the Feeling?

This morning, on the way to school, Gege threw a tantrum because he insisted on wearing the shoes that had got wet the night before.

He asked me, "Daddy, why are you making me cry?"

I answered him, "Daddy didn't say anything to make you cry. You're making yourself cry."

I helped him see the process clearly: he felt wronged, felt misunderstood, and was afraid of being late, and so the emotion welled up. Crying was his response to his own inner conflict, not my control over him.

What a child needs to learn is not "whether I'm allowed to cry," but where an emotion belongs: understanding that "my feelings are mine; I can feel them, but I can't push them onto someone else."

This is the first layer of boundaries: the division of responsibility between self and other. When a child begins to tell apart "who made me cry," he is also learning "who is in charge of my inner world." This is the starting point of emotional self-awareness, and the beginning of people understanding one another.

2. Society's Boundaries: The Grey Zone Between Rules

Afterwards Gege and I took the BTS Skytrain. The lift was packed with people: old people, young people, children. It was a lift marked "Priority for the elderly, people with disabilities, children, and monks."

When a few young people walked into the lift, some of the elderly passengers cast displeased looks at them. They hadn't been squeezed, and there was still room in the lift, but the feeling had already risen to their faces.

I could understand that displeasure. It was an emotion triggered when a "sense of the rules" is touched, but at the same time it showed how blurry people's understanding of boundaries can be.

Because that lift was not "exclusive" but "priority." The elderly mistook "priority" for "reserved," and the young mistook "open" for "anything goes." And so a subtle imbalance appeared in a public space.

This blurriness is the everyday state of human society. We are always moving vaguely among all kinds of boundaries: boundaries of tone, boundaries of space, boundaries of morality, even boundaries between love and responsibility.

But blurriness does not mean numbness. When a person senses that a boundary has been crossed, they instinctively shrink back, withdraw, frown. This shrinking back is not the result of rational thought; it is the most primal perception at work in protecting oneself.

3. A Philosophy of Boundaries: Order Grows Out of Blurriness

Whether it is a child's crying or an old person's expression, both reveal two forces of boundaries: one is inner differentiation, the other outer order. The child is learning: I am responsible for my own emotions. The elderly remind society: rules need to be respected. A truly mature sense of boundaries is the ability to strike a balance between "respecting the rules" and "understanding the individual."

A boundary is not a cold wall but an agreement for living together, one that lets us avoid crowding into each other's worlds while keeping understanding across the distance.

4. Boundaries as the Condition for Coming Closer

This sense of boundaries, this understanding of boundaries, is the key juncture at which human beings can come closer to one another.

When we build intimate relationships, maintain them, and repair them, when we talk with our children and communicate with our parents, when we try to bring each other closer, we find that touching boundaries is inevitable. Because every time we come closer, we touch the other person's boundaries.

This is not a mistake; it is life's natural response. Just as when the gravitational fields of two planets draw near each other, subtle deviations and tremors appear. Those tremors are the signs of a relationship being born.

So the first step in understanding boundaries is not to avoid touching them, but to become aware that they exist. We need to know where our own boundaries are and how they are formed, and also to understand where the other person's boundaries come from:

They may be old wounds, life experiences,

or a certain structure of personality, or a cultural habit.

When we can come to know each other's boundaries in this way, we begin to have a real "sense of boundaries." After this awareness, language, tone, and conversation all grow warmer. Coming closer is no longer an intrusion, and stepping back is no longer a rejection. Many relationships grow closer and closer because the people in them have learned this rhythm: sensing each other's boundaries again and again, and again and again finding a new balance between approaching and retreating. Within such boundaries, understanding becomes soft, and love becomes real.

Excerpted from On Consciousness as Element (《意識元素論》) · Author: Leo · November 2025